If they can put themselves in this mind set they will see their perceived failure as a learning experience.

The key to these learning experiences is to not repeat the same mistakes again.

If the same mistakes are happening time and again it will be very difficult to achieve any measure of success.But as long as there is a forward progression of getting things right as soon as possible then there is a real chance of getting good results.

Blogging

While every type of online marketer will face their own set of challenges, focusing on how a blogger can reassess their efforts can be instructive.

A blogger will most likely only be doing content marketing at least in the beginning. If they feel that they are not being rewarded for their efforts by higher search engine results they need to take an appropriate amount of time to see what is happening.

This could take a couple of days or longer depending on how ambitious their plans are.

Research

Maybe there is a lot of research that should have been done before jumping into blogging. They need to get realistic expectations based upon the competitiveness of the field they have chosen.

The more competitive, the more likely it will take longer to ever rank highly for their content. A blogger can’t expect to enter a crowded field and take over the space without a huge amount of effort.

Even if they produce amazing content that people like, it still can take years before they see actionable search results ranking on the first page.

A lot of this push-back is that, not only do they need to meet the current field’s informational value, they will have to far surpass it to get an organic growth rate.

Readers of other blogs in the space will not casually leave a trusted source to devote a lot of time giving a new blog a chance to impress them.

The amount of information being generated is too great and the reader’s attention span is too small for this transfer of loyalty to happen easily.

Analytics

Taking time to self assess their expectations can be a sobering experience.

They might need to pivot their expectations and dig through any data they have to find nuggets of actionable information. Instead of going head on with well established blogs in their field they might find that refocusing on a specific niche will allow them to rank for certain topics.

Even though they feel as if their marketing had failed to deliver results usually there are one or two bright spots amid all the gloom. Hopefully they have been using analytics programs or other content marketing hacks to keep track of various measurements regarding their audience.

They can initially investigate what content was actually more read or linked to then anything else they produced. From these results they can began to think why that content actually got some views opposed to everything else.

Maybe they had a unique take on the subject that others found interesting.

Possibly, they have found something to get a grasp on. Drilling down further, they can check out what geographical area the visitors who read their articles come from. By cross referencing these measurements, the blogger can start to identify a potential niche group they could speak to.

Niche

Now that they have identified a possible niche audience, they can look for topics that matter to this group.

They could discover that the topics are interesting to them as well. If their original content did get people linking back, it probably was because they put more time and effort into that particular post.

Their passion showed through in the content which appealed to a select group of readers.

By re-calibrating their blogs theme from a more general topic to one that is a laser focused niche, they can be more effective in producing engaging content.

This new focus on a specific niche will help them to not get distracted and pursue non productive paths. Once they have this idea in mind they can start to review all the content they have previously produced and see if it can be edited to satisfy their new specific niche.

They will need to look at everything through this lens and add to or subtract from previous posting to slant them towards the potential niche audiences interest.

Branding

While they are getting this done they need to start and think about how many other things need to be changed on the blog. They can look at what larger companies sometimes do when they hit a marketing roadblock, they re-brand. Instead of throwing everything away and totally starting over they build on whatever worked.

Similar to larger companies the blogger will be building on the one most successful message that people actually responded to.

Stop trying to get a wide variety of people to listen, take a pause, and start to talk to the people who have actually have listened to you. From this smaller group you can attempt to build a loyal group of fans that can be the base for greater things to come.

Encountering failure when doing content marketing can be difficult to accept.

But stepping away and looking at what went right instead all the wrong can give a blogger an idea where to begin again.

By reviewing the concepts presented above a blogger can get a general idea of how to fix their content marketing.

A guest article by Kerry Creaswood: Kerry Creaswood is a young and ambitious writer from Savannah, GA. She is interested in self-development, design and marketing. To find more about Kerry – check her Twitter

AllBlogThings.com - Blogging Made Easy!: What To Do When Content Marketing Fails To Improve SEO Performance

What To Do When Content Marketing Fails To Improve SEO Performance

When content marketing efforts don’t deliver the expected results, it can be frustrating. Producing content is a time consuming activity that online marketers must learn how to do efficiently. But there are different factors to consider when matching these efforts to an expected rise in search rankings. By investigating why a content marketing campaign fell flat they can learn from their mistakes